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Editorial

Keep them accountable

School districts must be vigilant against teachers who try to cheat

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The latest allegations of monkey business in school testing are a depressing example of the infinite variety of methods people seemingly will use to evade accountability for school performance. The swift response of Reynoldsburg City Schools officials, on the other hand, should be a model for school districts confronted with such dishonesty.

Parents and students say a former Reynoldsburg teacher of fifth- and sixth-graders in a program for gifted students told them to do poorly, on purpose, on a science test. She suggested they draw silly pictures where short-answer responses were supposed to go, and to use texting shorthand such as IDK and LOL.

This might seem to make no sense, except that the test was a pretest, meant to serve as the starting point against which the kids’ progress would be measured at the end of the school year. Doing especially badly on the pretest makes it a lot easier to show significant progress when you take the real test later.

Showing progress is especially important to teachers from now on, because state law mandates that student progress be the basis for at least half of a teacher’s evaluation.

Those whose students don’t improve much could receive negative reviews, which could translate to lower pay or dismissal.

Surely, for the vast majority of teachers, that will do what it’s intended to do: motivate them to focus on every student’s progress. But some will see the pressure as a justification to put a thumb on the scale.

Reynoldsburg school officials deserve credit for investigating the matter as soon as a parent relayed her child’s report about teacher Heather Campbell’s behavior. They questioned Campbell and students, and reviewed all of the science pretests taken by Campbell’s students. Of 68 tests, 54 were deemed “not sufficient attempts,” mainly because students had scribbled or drawn pictures for the short-answer questions.

The age of accountability in education — of trying to objectively measure schools’ effectiveness, and establishing rewards for progress and negative consequences for lack of it — has spawned many cheating scandals. Sometimes, teachers not-so-subtly signal students with answers during a test; others have outright erased and changed answers after the fact.

Some might conclude that accountability itself is to blame — that cheating is inevitable if people’s paychecks are tied to student performance.

But that view dishonors every honest and dedicated teacher and principal and, further, suggests that the public can’t have an objective accounting of the education system they’re paying for. That’s unacceptable.

Whether Campbell did what she is accused of hasn’t been formally determined, but she has resigned and the Reynoldsburg district has reported her to the Ohio Department of Education’s Office of Professional Conduct. If investigators there determine she did as is described, the office could revoke her teacher’s license.

Cheating to make students’ performance look better doesn’t help students; in fact, it can harm them, by making them ineligible for the extra help that lower scores might trigger. Schools districts should be vigilant against anything that would hide the true picture of student performance.